There’s a defense insurance companies love. It’s clean, it’s sympathetic, and on the surface, it’s hard to argue with: a deer ran into the road. Nobody caused this. Nature happened.
That was the position two separate insurance carriers took when our client — a passenger on a motorcycle — was left fighting for her life after a rural Wisconsin crash. What followed was one of the hardest-fought recoveries our firm has ever secured, involving a liability battle most attorneys would have walked away from, and a coverage fight that required dismantling an insurance company’s own policy language word by word.
Attorney James Gollnick did not walk away. Here’s how he won.
The Crash
On a clear summer morning, our client was a passenger on a motorcycle traveling on a straight, flat country highway. The driver struck a deer, causing the motorcycle to skid hundreds of feet. Our client was ejected from the motorcycle and landed in the roadway, bleeding from her ear and fading in and out of consciousness.
Two medical helicopters were dispatched to the scene: one for the driver, one for our client. She was intubated at the scene and airlifted to a Level 1 trauma center where she would spend the next 34 days, six of them sedated in the surgical ICU.
Her injuries were staggering: bleeding on the brain in multiple locations, skull fractures, a thoracic aortic injury, a shattered ankle requiring surgery, a wrist fracture, and road rash across most of her body.
When she was finally discharged in a wheelchair, she had no memory of the accident or the weeks that followed. Subsequent imaging confirmed permanent brain damage. She lost meaningful hearing in one ear along with her sense of smell, and she suffered lasting neurological effects that changed her daily life.
James had seen serious injuries before. He understood immediately that her treatment was not going to be the hard part.
The First Fight: Proving a Deer Strike Is Negligence
Both the driver’s liability carrier and our client’s own underinsured motorist carrier made the same initial calculation: a deer jumped out. No one is at fault. This is a comprehensive claim, not a liability claim. The liability carrier accepted a no-fault position. The UIM carrier closed its file entirely.
James saw it differently. And he went looking for proof.
A front-facing camera mounted to the motorcycle captured everything. The footage showed the driver traveling 68 mph in a 55-mph zone. It also showed something even more important: the deer was visible in the field alongside the road for approximately four seconds before impact — and the driver took no evasive action whatsoever.
James recognized immediately what that footage meant. This was not an unavoidable act of nature. This was a speeding driver who failed to respond to a visible hazard, in broad daylight, for four full seconds.
His theory was direct: at the legal speed limit and with adequate reaction time, the motorcycle would not have been at that precise point on that road at that precise moment. The deer strike was preventable. The driver’s negligence caused it.
James built that case from the camera footage up, then sent the liability carrier a demand that put them squarely on notice of their insured’s personal exposure if they failed to tender limits.
They tendered.
That was round one.
The Second Fight: A Coverage Ambush
The response was not a negotiation. It was a denial.
With the liability carrier’s limits secured, James turned to our client’s own underinsured motorist policy — coverage that she had paid for specifically for situations like this. He provided proper statutory notice and demanded UIM limits.
The UIM carrier invoked a policy exclusion, arguing that because the motorcycle’s driver lived in the same household as our client, her UIM coverage did not apply. The policy language stated that coverage was excluded for bodily injury sustained while occupying a vehicle owned by “any resident of your household.” Technically, the language fit the facts. The driver did live with our client.
But James knows the difference between technically correct and legally enforceable.
He went to work on the policy and the statute, and what he found was decisive. The Wisconsin statute that specifically authorizes these “drive other car” exclusions permits insurers to exclude coverage only for vehicles owned by the named insured’s spouse or relative. That is the full extent of what the legislature authorized. The law does not authorize exclusions for domestic partners. It uses specific relational terms — spouse, relative — and those terms carry legal meaning the carrier could not simply wish away.
The exclusion as written reached far beyond what Wisconsin law permits. By extending coverage to any household resident, regardless of familial or marital relationship, the policy was in direct conflict with state statute.
And here is where James’s preparation paid off most sharply: the carrier’s own policy contained a conformity clause — a standard provision stating that any policy terms in conflict with state law are automatically narrowed to conform to those statutes.
James did not need to ask a court to rewrite the policy. He pointed to the insurer’s own language and said: “Your policy tells you exactly how to resolve this — and when it’s resolved correctly, the exclusion doesn’t apply to our client.”
The carrier could not simultaneously invoke the exclusion to deny coverage and ignore the provision in its own policy rendering that exclusion unenforceable. James put that argument in writing, gave the carrier thirty days, and did not blink.
They paid.
What This Case Is Really About
James Gollnick is the kind of attorney who doesn’t accept a closed file as an answer. He’s the kind of attorney who reviews camera footage when everyone else has already moved on, reads conformity clauses when other lawyers are already thinking about the next case, and understands that an insurance company’s first position and its last position are often very different things — if you know how to move them.
Our client came to us facing two opponents who had each independently concluded her case had no value. A “deer strike” is an easy thing for an adjuster to write in a file and close. And a household exclusion is a real policy defense that can end a claim before it begins.
James fought both opponents with meticulous preparation, precise legal argument, and the kind of tenacity that the insurance industry does not expect and cannot easily withstand.
That’s what we do here. And when the insurance industry says there is nothing there, that’s when the most important work begins.
If you or someone you love has been seriously injured and been told by an insurance company that coverage does not apply — or that no one is at fault — contact Brian Hodgkiss Injury Lawyers. James Gollnick and our team have seen those arguments before. We know how to answer them.
